Collected
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Metaphysics of Feminism:

Michael Eldred

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SGREEK.

"A phenomenological tactic to the query of sex, that treats
maleness and femaleness not [as applying] ascriptively to males and women, however, like alternative
methods, open to either males or females, of mortal entities offering themself as whoever they are, is
taken by the Australian thinker, Michael Eldred. 'Feminine' being is then thought as an 'interstitial'
manner of experience amid you-and me [...] compared to displaying [masculinely] who one is in
self-presentation." Steven Cain Self-Presentation 69 Success Secrets - 69 Most Asked Questions
On Self-Presentation Emereo Publishing/HISTORY INK BOOKS 2014, no page no.
ISBN-13: 9781488861666

Table
of contents

What is it about that incoherent discursive mess
precariously held together by a cobweb of authorial and often authoritative
names, and called feminist theory, that exercises such an appeal for countless
women and even the odd man? Apparently, it is the promise of the "subversion"[2]
of "phallogocentric" "discourse" and "practices" that constitute and "construct"
sexuality, and thus the promise of the "liberation" of "desire" and "identity"
from "masculinist" shackles. All the quotation marks here mark terms that
play a prominent part in Judith Butler's influential book on Feminism
and the Subversion of Identity. The deployment of words such as "subversion"
and "desire" by feminist theory could not have been done more skilfully
by an advertising agency commissioned to design a campaign for a new perfume,
albeit that the promise of liberation is supposed to be situated beyond
the seductive allures of consumerist "signifying practices". To be sure,
in common with many other feminist writers, Butler's endeavour is that
of the subversion of "matrices of cultural intelligibility that govern
gendered life" (p.41). Like other 'advanced', pseudo-radical, 'subversive', philosophical
names on the Continental circuit, she belongs to those sophisticated,
smooth-operating, modern-day sophists who know how to skilfully work their
chosen pliable market segment, which can be characterized roughly as educated,
soft-left liberal, progressive democrats. Despite all the sham radical
openness of their associative, slip-sliding, metonymic rhetorical discourse,
it is from the outset tailored to and panders to unquestioned political
prejudices on which its success vitally depends. The willing recipients
of this discourse are therefore already at home in a comfy club.

1. Metaphysical feminist substance

A prominent position is assumed in feminist theory, and in Butler's book
in particular, by the phrase "metaphysics of substance". Butler and others
claim to put a critical distance between their own thinking and the traditional,
purportedly phallological, and therefore, oppressive discourse of metaphysics,
which is accused of being "naturalizing" and "ahistorical" and, along with
that, of erecting an "ontology of substances" (p.25). What does Butler
understand by a "metaphysics of substance" and why is such metaphysics
to be put at arm's length? And does Butler's alternative proposal at all
elude the metaphysics of substance? To start with the answers to these
questions, let us turn to Section V of the first chapter, Identity, Sex,
and the Metaphysics of Substance.

The concern is with identity, i.e. with how people, in particular, women,
understand who they themselves are. Identity is self-understanding as an
aspect of one's own existing in the world. Each individual understands
not only the world in its multifarious aspects but also themself as someone
in the world. According to Butler, such identities are supposed by traditional
understanding to be "self-identical, persisting through time as the same,
unified and internally coherent" (p.22), and this temporal persistence,
Butler says, is grounded in the "definitional structure of personhood,
be that consciousness, the capacity for language, or moral deliberation"
(ibid.) or "self-determination" (p.26). Substance is thus understood to
be the temporal persistence of the conscious human subject who understands
itself consistently and coherently over time, can speak and determine its
own existence on the basis of its free will. Substance is thus hominized
as the human subject of consciousness. To this conception Butler counterposes
her own that the 'substantial person' is only the effect of "socially instituted
and maintained norms of intelligibility" (p.23), i.e. of "signifying practices"
(p.184) through which human subjects come to understand who they are in
the world, i.e. to assume an identity.

Can the metaphysics of substance be truncated to the metaphysics of
the conscious human subject? Is consciousness to be regarded as equivalent
to the "capacity for language"? A brief look at the history of philosophy
shows that substance can by no means be equated with the conscious human
subject and that even the capacity for language traditionally does not
imply human subjectivity nor human consciousness. The word 'substance'
is originally the Latin translation of Greek ou)si/a
(ousia) and u(pokei/menon (hypokeimenon), both
terms playing a central role in Aristotelean metaphysics and thereafter
in all of Western metaphysics. But these two Greek terms have nothing at
all to do with human consciousness or human subjectivity. Ou)si/a
is the primary mode of being (of something) as a persisting, de-fined presence.
As such a persisting, de-fined presence, it lies before us as something
which can be spoken of and thus attributed predicates. This is the sense
of u(pokei/menon, whose root 'keim' means 'to
lie'. The 'hypo' part of u(pokei/menon is a
prefix or preposition meaning in this case 'under', so that the u(pokei/menon
is that which 'lies under', 'underlies' and is thus 'sub-ject', i.e. 'thrown
under'. The 'subject' in the understanding of Greek metaphysics is thus
not the human subject, but rather the things out there in the world which
can be spoken of and attributed predicates. The human essence in Greek
understanding is that being which has the capacity to speak and, through
this capacity, has access to the being of beings. That is, humans are marked
as human beings by the capacity to understand beings in their being.
In Greek experience they are not subjects.

In medieval philosophy, which is simultaneously Christian theology,
the substantial subject again is not the human, but God as the subject
underlying all that is created, including humans, so that humans are the
ob-jects, i.e. that which is 'thrown against' the underlying almighty,
supreme subject.

If substance is understood as that mode of being which underlies, then
it becomes apparent that Butler has not in any way escaped the pull of
the metaphysics of substance but has merely passed along its historical
trajectory with a displacement of the subject in the course of late metaphysical
discourse from the conscious human subject to social practices, in this
case, to social signifying practices. The schema of the metaphysics of
substance has just been given one more twist, one more inversion through
the metaphysics of Marxian and Nietzschean thinking and its adherents,
culminating in the so-called 'linguistic turn', which has made another
realm of beings, namely practices, into the subject underlying all that
is. But all inversion remains the same, i.e. it remains within the same
schema of metaphysics as a possible variation, a schema in which certain
beings or regions of beings are accorded a privileged status as ground.
Specifically, in Butler's and other structuralist metaphysics of social
practices as substance, including the bevy of French thinkers of which
Anglophone feminism is so enamoured, human beings become the "effect" or
precipitate of the signifying practices into which they are "inserted".
Signifying practices, a certain class of beings, are thus accorded the
privilege of grounding other beings, to wit, human beings in their identity
or self-understanding.

One may object that social practices or socio-cultural signifying practices
do not qualify as underlying substance because they are subject to change
and, taken together, are neither coherent nor consistent. But is persistence
through time the essential hallmark of substance? To decide this, it is
helpful to turn to the phenomena themselves and do some phenomenological
finger exercises, something which Butler and most other feminists joining
in 'advanced' discourse have in general failed to do — to their own detriment.
Engagement with the phenomena would be more persuasive than adducing an
entire array of authoritative authorial names such as Foucault, Lacan,
Irigary, Kristeva, Wittig and others, along with their phantasmagoric theoretical
constructions, in order to legitimize assertions. If we take the simple
Aristotelean example of a bed as an instance of substance or ou)si/a
(ousia), this does not mean that the bed is unchanging, for it is produced,
is subject to wear and tear and can easily be destroyed. What substance
means in the case of a bed is that it is the bearer of attributes which
can be predicated of it in speaking about it, e.g. it has a certain colour
and size and is positioned in a certain place. The colour, size and position
of the bed can all change, and yet the bed is still spoken of as a bed,
i.e. as a substantial something. Nor is the bed as a substance or ou)si/a
in the sense of its to\ ti\ h)=n ei)=nai, its
'what-it-was-ness' or 'essence', 'natural' or 'ahistorical', if only for
the simple reason that the idea of a bed only makes sense within a culture
that uses beds.

The situation is similar in the metaphysics of modernity initiated paradigmatically
by Descartes and formulated consummately in depth in Kant's metaphysics.
The metaphysics of subjectivity casts the subject as an underlying consciousness
which strives for self-certainty in its knowing relations to beings. The
identity of this consciousness does not lie in its unchangeability, in
its constancy through time, but in what Kant calls the 'transcendental
apperception' of consciousness whereby the representations appearing to
consciousness are gathered together in such a way that they all belong
to one unified consciousness. This unity of consciousness as a mode of
being constitutes the ego's transcendental identity, and this by no means
requires that somehow the contents of consciousness remain the 'same'.
Identity as apperception is transcendental because this unity is given
prior
to any specific representations experienced — Kant's famous
a priori.
In other words, human consciousness has a past, present and future and
gathers all these 'happenings' in consciousness into its
own identity,
i.e. it recognizes itself as that consciousness underlying, i.e.
as the subject of, all these experiences. Descartes says this as cogito
me cogitare: I think/experience myself thinking/experiencing.
This myself is not a product of the experiences but is prior to them in
an ontological casting of subjectivity. What is essential is not a constancy
of experience or self-understanding through that experience, but the mode
of being underlying these experiences.

The same holds mutatis mutandis for Butler's metaphysics of signifying
practices, which indeed, in the footsteps of Marx and Nietzsche, casts
an ontology in which signifying practices serve as the subject. Butler's
understanding of ontology as a philosophical discourse of naturalized being,
as if being were outside history, is a narrow and outmoded view. Rather,
her own discourse implicitly casts, and that very insistently, an understanding
of being in which signifying practices assume the foundational position
underlying all else. Butler's writing strategy of putting scare quotes
around certain words derived from 'to be' and claiming that certain nouns
are not nouns (substantives in an older terminology) does nothing at all
to free her from the strictures of the metaphysics of substance, but rather
indicates how helplessly and unknowingly she is entangled within such strictures.
Butler is not alone in this entanglement, and despite all the gestures
of progressiveness and cutting-edgedness put on display by feminist theory
in its parades of obfuscating jargon, it instantiates nevertheless the
metaphysics of substance it derides, even when, on the other hand, it pretends
to be down-to-earth and gets sociological.

Metaphysics and ontology both have a history and both do not at all
necessarily assert a naturalness of being beyond or independent of what
Butler calls culture. Butler's metaphysics of signifying practices is situated
unwittingly within this Western history of metaphysics and is not free
of it. If her implicit metaphysics were to be made explicit, then it would
be confronted with questions which feminist theory consistently fails and
refuses to see. The principal question in this regard is that concerning
the being of social practices. It is simply repeated dogmatically like
a mantra that social (including cultural) practices must be the starting-point
for any theory of gender, since gender, it is claimed, is "socially
constructed". But what is society? This question is invariably passed over,
as if to pose it would be to fall back into the insidious clutches of an
ahistorical, naturalizing metaphysics. Society is a mode of being in which
human beings are sociated with each other. But what is human being, and
what is sociation, and how is it possible? Such questions become all the
more urgent once it is realized that society, in these ostensibly progressive
theories, is posited as the ultimate underlying substance. But they are
never asked, and have not yet even faintly appeared on the horizon of feminist
discourse.

In the beginnings of metaphysics, an intimate interrelation was thought
between social being and language. For Aristotle, the human is the being
that has the logos, i.e. who can speak, and is therefore sociated,
i.e. a polis-like being. The polis in this fundamental context is not to
be understood as a city or as the historical city-state in an area of the
Mediterranean called Greece, but rather it is the opening of sociated human
being per se, and this opening is essentially connected in Greek
thinking experience with humans having language. Butler's insistence on
signifying practices as the bond constituting society still lies within
the ambit of the Western beginnings, but she does not know that her discourse
is thus situated and so merely reproduces unknowingly a certain ontology
whilst claiming to be free of it.

2. Leaving metaphysical feminism behind

So is it to be concluded that Butler's theory, and along with it the
bulk of feminist theory, is to be rejected as being still metaphysical?
Not at all. Rather, it means that, in recognizing the metaphysical nature
of its own discourse, feminism would be moved or jolted to finally ask
deeper questions. Butler's strategy is to provide the framework for putting
certain discourses of identity, i.e. of self-understanding, into question,
thus displacing and shifting their meaning and opening up other possibilities
for how people (in this case, predominantly women) could understand themselves
in their existence in the world. Such non-standard self-understandings
could indeed open up new possibilities in a cultural struggle. But is the
struggle of feminism exhausted already in the struggle to cast new and
other cultural self-understandings in alternative discourses? Is the ultimate
challenge for feminism "to think through the possibility of subverting
and displacing those naturalized and reified notions of gender that support
masculine hegemony and heterosexist power, to make gender trouble" (p.
44)? Not in the least, for there are deeper questions at issue here which
can no longer be approached from within a metaphysical framework, no matter
whether this framework be explicit or, as in Butler's case, implicit.

Such deeper questions, which would explore an essential historical relationship
between gendered being and being itself, can only emerge when it is finally
asked what dimension it is within which people practise their social
signifying practices. What is the dimension of sociation that enables such
a thing as society? To pursue such a question concerning Mitsein,
and the many questions that inevitably emerge in connection with it, it
is necessary to finally step outside and back from the firmly cast framework
of metaphysics, in all its historical twists and turnings, which continues
to cast its shadow from the Western beginnings lying on the Eastern horizon,
and to venture forth into an other cast of thought. But Butler explicitly
refuses this path of thinking with her misconceived rejection of an "ontology
of gender whereby the meaning of being a woman or a man is [or would
be; ME] elucidated within the terms of phenomenology" (p.43, Butler's italics).
Instead, she opts for a "genealogical investigation that maps out the political
parameters of its construction in the mode of ontology" (ibid.). This way
of thinking gender has the consequence that "political parameters" (and
thus supposedly self-evident moral and political convictions in connection
with strategic considerations in a constellation of power) serve as the
fundamental points of orientation in the discourse without the meaning
of their being, which is prior to any moral or political considerations,
ever being questioned or clarified.

Butler justifies her refusal to seriously pose questions regarding an
"ontology of gender whereby the meaning of being a woman
or a man [would be] elucidated" with the claim that to do so would be to
treat gender as a natural category. For Butler, all ontology is "naturalized"
(p.42) and therefore outside history. For her, any phenomenon that isn't
social is necessarily natural. But the question of the being of gender
is
historical without being reducible to being merely an effect of
social discursive practices (whose being is left unquestioned). The question
of being is situated prior to the dichotomy society/nature or culture/nature
(where prior here is not meant in a temporal sense, but rather in
the order of enabling conditions of possibility). To pose the question
concerning the being of gender involves examining the phenomena of historical,
gendered being-in-the-world against the background of gendered being's
embeddedness in an historical understanding of being as such that can be
coaxed to come to light by examining the traditional texts of metaphysics,
starting with Plato and Aristotle. Western thinking and Western being-in-the-world,
at least, are to the present day silently shaped and determined by the
discreet historical background workings of metaphysics.

A questioning gender-ontological endeavour would not lead to, say, making
a "construction of the category of women as a coherent and stable subject"
(p.8f). On the contrary! Nor would it lead to a global critique of a "selfsame
phallogocentrism" (p.18) which would 'monologically' and 'imperialistically'
and 'Eurocentrically' level all differences in the "array of cultural and
historical contexts in which sexual difference takes place" (p.18). Elementary
phenomenology would have shown Butler that the same by no means denies
and levels difference, but rather demands it, just as, conversely, difference
is only possible within a gathering into the same. Just as a series of
different
colours can only be different within the gathering sameness of colour,
so too there can only be differences in (gendered) identity, i.e. self-understanding,
within the same dimension of self-understanding itself. Different
self-understandings are different self-understandings. And to clarify
what a self-understanding is at all demands asking the question of being.
Where are self-understandings situated, in what dimension?

Movement can only come into the question of (the meaning of) gendered
being in its deepest sense by posing the question of being itself, which
allows the casting of beings as a whole in their being to be re-vised and
possibly re-cast. This represents, beyond the metaphysically confined and
dogmatic horizon of cultural critique and Cultural Studies, the most radical
possibility for, inter alia, "rethinking subversive possibilities for sexuality
and identity" not merely "within the terms of power itself" (p.40), but
rather with regard to an alternative self-understanding within an alternative
casting of being itself. What the overcoming of the metaphysics of substance
demands is a side-step out of traditional metaphysics, in which the question
of quiddity or whatness has played the lead role for millennia, into a
questioning of the phenomenon of quissity, of whoness, that has remained
philosophically mute to the present day, including and especially in approaches
to the question of gender via "signifying practices".

Despite the occasional genuflection toward Heidegger, feminist theory
has yet to discover the genuine ontological difference and to pose for
itself the question concerning the meaning of historically gendered being.
It has allowed itself to be befuddled by the Derridean destruction of phenomenology
into grammatogrammy by replacing what can be brought to light for the mind's
eye with the continually shifting play on words through endless writing.[3]
Feminist theory proceeds from the distinction between two kinds of human
beings, men and women, i.e. an ontic difference, which it then proceeds
to interpret e.g. in terms of how "signifying practices" are "inscribed"
in two different kinds of bodies. To ask what gender means, leaving such
metaphysics behind, requires asking for the twofold in being itself between
standing presence and its negation, which was unable to come into its own
in metaphysical thinking. Thinking beyond metaphysics, men and women do
not exist, but masculine and feminine beings do in two modes of human being
itself, i.e. in two different modes of how human beings belong to and stand
out resonantly in ek-static time-space as who they are. To be
somewho in relating to standing presence is to come to a stand through
understanding the well-defined looks that beings offer of themselves, i.e.
to stand in the light of reason in possession of the lo/goj
through which beings as such are gathered into a stand. This can be called
the masculine, or phallic, mode of being for human beings.

The three-dimensional clearing of time-space, however, is not exhausted by the standing
presence of the beings standing well-definedly within it, thus allowing
human beings to come to a rational, pro-ductive, fore-casting understanding.
Nor is it exhausted even by the play of presencing and absencing of beings
presenting the sights of themselves in the 3D-time-clearing.[4]
Its differing, deferential, but undeferred other, remaining when both standing
presence and the play of presencing and absencing are exhauriated, or drawn off,
is the quivering whence all attunement
resonates. The sensitivity to this unclearly defined quivering can be called,
for want of a better name, the feminine mode of being. In belonging to
the quivering of the time-clearing, human being itself is attunedly 'feminine'
which is therefore merely the title for what cannot be gathered into a
well-defined stand, thus lending a stand to the human being who understands.
Whereas metaphysically, phallic human being has been oriented toward the
third-person stance of beings as they present themselves in the time-clearing,
above all, with the intent of leading them forth, i.e. of pro-ducing them,
into actual presence, a feminine mode of human being has quivered attuningly
in the subtraction of third-person understanding, leaving the second-person
difference of intimate attuned presence with one another. Seen in this
way, the second-person fold of being is not confined to the intimacy between
human beings, but encompasses all intimate encounter with other beings,
human or not, in which attunement is felt as appreciative or depreciative,
uplifting or downcasting co-presence with the other. The well-worn grammatical
categories of second and third person thus lose their trivial self-evidence
and are translated back into an ontological meaning pertaining to a twofold
in the 3D-temporal clearing itself, to which all human being is ex-posed
so long as it ek-sists. For such an insight to come to be seen and felt
by human being is a possible historical eventuation, not a 'timeless' metaphysical
'truth'.

There is much more to be said, of course, on the fold in being between
phallic and 'feminine' modes of being.[5]
The attempt to say this fold, which is also a fold in the whoness of human
being, is part of the historic struggle to get over, rather than get rid
of, metaphysics.

Notes

.

Judith Butler Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion
of Identity Routledge, New York and London 1999. Back

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